Reiner went quiet, staring off vaguely in the direction of the fighting pits. He didn’t seem particularly torn up or upset about the rather grave accusations Jorfr had just leveled at the knight-captain - Zelsys was willing to wager that Reiner had heard such things said about not just Von Wickten, but all of the town’s nobility. It wasn’t prevalent in public, but even Old Man Duma had derided the Dragon Knights for being “parade-obsessed asshats” during their conversation with him. The three actual cultivators at the table went on to exchange information regarding their time apart in town, these being mostly observations on the state of Arches as a municipality, from the ever present, easily spotted Pateiria-affiliated Occupationist agents, to the uneasy cooperation between the between the Dragon Knights and the aforementioned subversive foreigners.

A few minutes passed, and the ruckus started up. The bookie’s voice blasted out of reproductors mounted inside cages atop the betting counter: “The second half of tonight’s quarter-finals is about to begin, and we have at last filled our final slot! No further entrants will be accepted! All combatants, please make your way down to your respective pit and remove all weapons or armor!”

Zelsys had already removed her boots before the bookie had gotten to that last part, seemingly having intended to do so from the very start. She also removed her armored sleeve and the leather half-sheath on her back, leaving them in Zef’s care as she stood up, holding out her arm towards the pit she was to fight in, with one eye closed and her thumb extended. Looks of amused expectation came over her companions, while Reiner looked on in confusion. She drew in a deep breath, a strange, metallic smell filling the air around her before she leapt from the stands, soaring dozens of meters overhead only to land exactly in the middle of the pit. Great commotion gripped the onlookers with many questioning whether someone had just killed themselves, only for the ruckus to grow yet further when the dust cleared and they saw Zelsys casually sitting at the edge of the pit.

None dared to approach her from behind as she sat there with her legs crossed, a tranquil smile on her face as her predatory gaze scanned the spectators.

The other combatants gathered from all corners of the amphitheater, most of them inconspicuously walking to their respective pits. Her opponent was to be a brick shithouse of an Ikesian man, bald-headed with a well-trimmed black beard and equally well-trimmed, yet immensely bushy eyebrows. He wore a workman’s overalls with the top hanging down like an apron to showcase his hairy, protruding gut. Despite the tremendous amount of fat on his frame, his limbs were like tree trunks, his hands more thickly calloused than those of many martial artists. And his fingers… They were the colour of solid stone, completely grey down to the knuckles.

He stared her down with a calm look in his eyes, curtly stating: “If y’kill me in the pit, know that neither my family nor my guild will care about the law when it comes to extracting a blood price… Though someone of your ken probably cares more about the fact killing yer opponent is a loss by disqualification here - we use Sanger Family Rules here.”

“Sanger Family Rules, huh…” she thought with distaste. The ruleset was overly formalized in her opinion, giving the referees far too much wiggle-room in determining who won after the fact. Nevertheless, Zel understood his hostility, considering her appearance and mannerisms, and so she truthfully told the man: “I don’t feel the need to go all-out on a random civilian, I’ll pull my punches. Say, what’s your attribute line?”

A slow blink from the stonemason. A deep breath in, followed by the exhalation of Fog, tinged orange from a surfeit of Terra.

“C in Force, D Plus in Precision, C Minus in Hardness, D in Aether,” he answered.

“How ‘bout yours?”

“I’ll take care to restrain myself to that level,” she sidestepped the question.

The reproductors hissed to life, the bookie’s voice blasting over the crowd again. A rhythmic drumbeat began, the wordless cries of men accompanying it as the first fighters were called out.

“In Pit One stands a well-known regular, Benedict Sailer, the Brass-eyed Pirate, versus…” the bookie began, the music changing about twenty seconds in… Into a slow, steady drumbeat. “The fourth of our top contenders, Jacob Hillerin, Ever Unyielding!”

Zel could make out the sounds of both men dropping into the pit, and just as the sounds of their fists clashing began, the bookie moved on. A vaguely classical-sounding tune picked up. Strings, woodwinds, an opera singer. It was strangely familiar, but she couldn’t place it. She guessed that a library of popular songs must’ve come with the mnemonic playback machine.

“Next, in Pit Two we have the ever-feuding pair of Iron-Legged Isidora Kluck, versus…”

Another song. A quick, folksy tune, dominated by a woodwind and light drums… Then, out of nowhere, the thunderous growl of Ezaryl Krishorn’s lightning-enchanted, double-necked shamisen. “...Sabina Haspel, the Killing Grace!”

The music cut out. The angry screaming of two women who legitimately hated one another preceded the sound of a side kick against ribs.

“Of course, she would’ve had a hand in making songs for that machine’s library…” Zel thought, her eyes still fixed on her opponent.

Another song. Whistling. Humming. Stamping of feet. No singing.

“And in Pit Three, the Strongest Human of our top five…”

Masonson himself started belting as he cracked his fingers.

“In our own towns we are foreigners now, our names are spat and cursed!” he began.

A dozen or so onlookers joined in. Their voices were undercut by the jeers of people clearly not fond of Ikesian populism - Occupationists most likely, by Zel’s reckoning. More people started joining in, an expectant smile growing on Masonson’s face as the man noticed the spark of like-mindedness behind Zel’s eyes.

“The headlines smack of another attack, not the last, and not the worst!”

She knew the lyrics. Even having heard the song only twice or thrice before, the sorrow and anger it was sung with had carved its words into her brain. She joined in, not caring that this was her opponent’s theme.

“Oh my fathers they look down on me, I wonder how they feel, to see their noble sons driven down, beneath a coward’s heel!”

Masonson jumped down into the pit, his arms spread wide as he basked in the attention of the onlookers and laughed - laughed at those who had the mind to jeer him for the gall to cry out in defiance against foreign occupiers.

“...against- Wait a moment, it seems we have a problem-”

The bookie cut out. White noise flooded the amphitheater for a short while, before the bookie returned, audibly catching his breath. The music she had given him started up, this copy being only a thirty-two second snippet specifically edited down to be used as entrance music - one of the lyrics had even been substituted in from another song to better fit Zelsys. As the violent rhythm and boastful vocals of the Krishorn Clan heiress kicked in, the bookie began shouting his throat out between the lyrics, but the way he worded and pronounced things was… Like that time before, not his true self.

“Second Coming with the eyes of a stranger, resurrected to fire and flames, no mercy!”

“...a stranger from far down south, all the way from Willowdale!” the bookie howled, mirroring the lyrics of the song.

“Another Bureau Geas? This has to be Strolvath’s doing…” she thought. Only he had both the foreknowledge of her musical preferences and the influence to have something like this done. “That old cunt.”

“Unleashed dominator, arise! Glimmer of hope, stand up for all you believe, the righteous path, die on your feet, don't live on your knees!”

The lyrics trailed off into an aggressive blend of drums and some sort of distorted strumming instrument whose name Zelsys couldn’t recall. The bookie somehow rattled off the rest of his introduction in the space of this brief solo.

“Founder of the Newman Sect, creator of Sturmblitz Kunst, Prime Slayer of the Willowdale Slayer’s Guild! Folks, if there’s anyone here tonight that’ll give Lord Von Wickten trouble, it’s her! Zelsys Newman, the Conqueror of Storms!”

“Awaken, Conquering One, the Wanderer, Unchained!”

She hadn’t told the bookie any of that. It absolutely had to have been Strolvath’s doing.

“Oh well, it can’t be helped,” she thought, smiling as she dropped into the pit.

Zel took a deep breath, filling her lungs as full as they could go, exhaling a dense cloud of milky-white Fog that crackled with blue sparks of Fulgur as it sank to the ground. It was a pointless gesture to casual spectators, but anyone who knew anything about breathing techniques could distinguish that her method was orders of magnitude better-developed than her opponent’s.

He stomped his feet into the sand, taking up a wide, defensive stance. Zel came at him with a few probing jabs and kicks, determining a general impression of the mason’s combat style off of only this one brief exchange. He was faster and more precise than a normal human of his size had any right to be, but it was clear that stonemasonry had informed his approach to combat. Masonson made use of a relatively limited repertoire of specific moves, all of them near-perfect. Consistent. Predictable. In order to put on a show, Zelsys restrained herself and cautiously measured her own strength to match the force of the mason’s strikes, exchanging blows with him for a short while before she started mixing him up with feints and attacks from otherwise impractical angles. She even let herself get hit so that she could make a display of allowing the force to bend her over backwards, only to right herself without her back having ever touched the sand.

Over the next several minutes Zelsys gradually began to hold back less and less, pushing the mason harder and harder. His stone-like fists struck only empty air or her elbows, eventually bruising even their hardened flesh while she remained seemingly untouched. She could easily read him even as she was. She unconsciously predicted the vectors of his strikes, and where a normal human’s cognition accelerated in the midst of an adrenaline rush to the point of effectively affording them an extra half-second to make decisions for every real-time secon, Zelsys using only the Shifting Winds of Eternal Spring foundational breathing technique operated at a rate of combat cognition that equated to a full additional subjective second for every second that passed in reality. Between her superior cognition, physicality, and overall understanding of how the human body moved, reading the stonemason’s moves was easy.

Running up onto the walls of the pit, Zelsys leapt at him feet-first and threw him to the ground with a headscissor takedown, rolling off of him forwards, hand springing back to her feet, jumping back up to the edge of the pit, and elbow-dropping him. It looked great, but between the weight disparity and the fact she intentionally took most of the impact, it barely bruised his massive gut. She even made a show of lifting the man’s tremendous bulk seemingly effortlessly and powerbombing him into the sand, though she had faked it - the actual move would’ve killed him, while the way she did it only knocked the breath out of him and perhaps broke a rib. Or, at least, she would’ve broken a few of his ribs, were his bones not inhumanly tough even beyond what his Hardness suggested.

When he actually got up and made it clear that nothing was broken by the way he moved and distinct lack of pain in his expression, Zelsys decided to end it with one strike. An indisputable knockout that the referee would have no reason to undermine, as none of the three referees had any reasonable way to know that she intended to challenge Von Wickten.

“Tap out now, else I’ll have to knock you out,” she warned. The stonemason just shook his head, spat a glob of bloody spit into the sand, and grumbled: “I don’t tap out. Ever.”

The fat Ikesian grinned, his teeth bloody, but all there.

“Surrender ain’t in my blood,” he said. “Besides… I’ve been knocked out dozens o’ times. Even Baldwin couldn’t keep me down for the ten-count, Von Wickten had to have me DQ’ed so I wouldn’t embarrass his butt buddy. My skull’s just too thick for anything to stick for long, always has been.”

“Very well.”